David Loy2015-03-03T17:46:34-05:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=david-loyCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for David LoyGood old fashioned elbow grease.What Buddhism and Psychotherapy Are Learning From Each Othertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.55499632014-07-02T16:29:23-04:002014-09-01T05:59:05-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,
but by making the darkness conscious. --Carl Jung

Whenever Buddhism has spread to another culture, it has interacted with the belief systems of that culture, resulting in the development of something new. Today the main site of interaction within the West is not Judeo-Christianity but psychology, a conversation that has led to innovative types of psychotherapy and, most recently, to the extraordinary success of the mindfulness movement.

There is already a large and rapidly growing literature on the relationship between Buddhism and psychotherapy. Many Western-trained therapists have become Buddhist practitioners, and incorporate contemplative techniques into their therapy. Some of them have also become authorized as Buddhist teachers. Buddhism is providing new perspectives on the nature of psychological well-being, and new practices that help to promote it.

On the other side, more than a generation of Buddhist practice by committed Western students has made it apparent that meditation by itself is sometimes insufficient to resolve deep-rooted psychological problems and relationship difficulties. In its own short history the psychotherapeutic tradition has gained considerable insight into the mechanisms of denial, rationalization, repression, projection, and so forth, which can help us understand how Buddhist practice sometimes goes wrong--for example, the complicated transference/countertransference that can distort the relationship between therapist and client (or between teacher and disciple).

Transference, as originally defined by psychoanalysts, is the unconscious tendency of a patient to take emotions and behavioral patterns felt toward one person (for example, a parent) and transfer them to another (such as one's therapist or guru). Countertransference occurs when the therapist (or teacher) also gets caught up in that transference. If a spiritual teacher is surrounded by a coterie of devotees who look upon him or her as god-like, that is transference. When that teacher begins to agree with them, that is countertransference--a delusion incompatible with our usual understanding of awakening, but not uncommon.

Traditional Buddhist teachings do not highlight such mechanisms because the focus has been different. Buddhist practice emphasize nonattachment to "empty" psychological phenomena, while psychotherapy emphasizes understanding how those phenomena affect our relationships, including one's relationship with oneself. The important discovery is that these two approaches can supplement each other because they share the same basic concern: alleviating our suffering.

The main challenge for each side in this dialogue is resisting the temptation to swallow the other. It's easy for a therapist to reject Buddhist awakening as an escapist fantasy, and just as easy for Buddhists to dismiss a psychotherapeutic focus on relationship problems as obsessing with past events rather than realizing one's true nature and living fully in the present. This temptation is aggravated by the fact that the cultural and historical gap between them is so great, which tends to activate Eurocentrism ("the intellectually imperialistic tendency in much Western scholarship to assume that European and North American standards and values are the center of the moral and intellectual universe," according to Jeffrey Rubin) or to idealize Orientocentrism ("the idealizing and privileging of Asian thought--treating it as sacred--and the neglect if not dismissal of the value of Western psychological perspectives"). If we are honest with ourselves, most of us have a bias favoring one side or the other.

It's not easy to steer a course between them, and that's the challenge: together they can help to free us from seeking a security of sorts by identifying with one particular way of thinking, such as the categories of Freudian psychoanalysis or the paradoxes of Chan/Zen. Rubin, a Buddhist psychotherapist, describes this pitfall in his book Psychotherapy and Buddhism:

Fitting in with the institutional ethos, including minimizing self-vulnerability, enables trainees to solidify their precarious status. Embracing the theories of the school to which one identifies offers a sense of intellectual and emotional comfort.... It also gives one a stable identity and sense of belonging. But it fosters unrealistic ideals and expectations of self-knowledge, self-mastery, and selfless service, as well as a phobic stance toward emotional distress and vulnerability. Psychotherapists may thus have great difficulty acknowledging or coping with their own vulnerability.

For trainee psychotherapists substitute Buddhist practitioners and the passage offers as much insight into where Buddhists can get stuck.

Dwelling "in-between"--what might be called the position of no fixed position--does not mean rejecting either perspective but being able to appreciate both. Each can be helpful, according to the situation, yet neither has exclusive claims to The Truth. Irvin Yalom makes this point well in his book Existential Psychotherapy:

Therapists may offer the patient any number of explanations to clarify the same issue.... None, despite vehement claims to the contrary, has sole rights to the truth. After all, they are all based on imaginary "as if" structures.... They are all fictions, psychological constructs created for semantic convenience, and they justify their existence only by virtue of their explanatory power. [Yalom's emphasis]

We need such fictions because our minds do not function in a vacuum but are activated by such constructs.

The Buddha was also careful not to set up his teachings as the only truth. In the Canki Sutta he says, "It is not proper for a wise man...to come to the conclusion 'this alone is truth, and everything else is false.'" He compared his teachings to a raft that can be used to ferry ourselves across the river of suffering to the "other shore" of enlightenment, but not afterwards to be carried around on one's back. If all psychotherapeutic explanations are imaginary "as if" structures justified by the ways they help us change, and if Buddhist teachings are roadmaps showing us the way to go, then the door opens for a genuine cross-cultural inquiry with profound implications for how we understand and transform ourselves.

That door may be open, yet it's also important not to minimize the challenges involved in a dialogue between two such very different approaches. Traditional psychotherapeutic approaches are concerned to help heal the self, whereas the Buddhist model of well-being emphasizes liberating insight into the delusion of self and developing what Rubin terms "non-self-centric subjectivity." Neither tradition by itself provides the full picture of who we are, what our problem is, and how we transform.

The good news is that the burgeoning field of Buddhist psychotherapy is aware of the difference and has begun to explore the relationship between the two. We can be hopeful about the future of this dialogue because it is anchored empirically in what really works to reduce the dukkha "suffering" of therapeutic patients and Buddhist practitioners.

Given the pre-modern roots of the Buddhist tradition, the question from a psychotherapeutic perspective is whether Buddhist teachings mythologize the developmental process insofar as they understand the ultimate goal as transcending this world of suffering and delusion. Given the secular roots and pragmatic goals of psychotherapy, the question from a Buddhist perspective is whether such therapies still retain too limited an understanding of our human potential, ignoring possibilities that transcend conventional assumptions about what it means to be human.

The tension between these two questions is what makes the conversation between Buddhism and psychotherapy so fascinating--and important.]]>The Karma of GMO Foodtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.54411042014-06-05T12:30:38-04:002014-08-05T05:59:04-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/
An alternative approach is to consider whether traditional Buddhist teachings might give us some insight into our new situation.

Because of the way it spread, Buddhism has tended to adapt to local dietary customs, rather than export and impose food restrictions. Given the difficult climate of Tibet, for example, it is not surprising that Tibetan Buddhists have often eaten a lot of meat. Another factor is that, in general, Buddhism has been less concerned about what we eat than how we eat it, since our dukkha "suffering" is rooted in our craving -- and food is the second most popular example of human craving.

Buddhist monastics are expected to live a simple life largely unconcerned about mundane matters such as food. In many Buddhist cultures they eat only before noon. According to the Patimokha that regulates their daily lives, "There are many fine foods such as ghee, butter, oil, honey, molasses, fish, meat, milk, and curds. If any monastic who is not sick should ask for them and consume them, it is an offense entailing expiation." Notice the careful wording. Evidently the problem is not with these foods themselves, but that seeking and indulging in them is a distraction from what monastics should be concentrating on. There is no suggestion that lay followers should also avoid them, and the qualification -- "any monastic who is not sick" -- is a good example of Buddhist pragmatism.

Historically, the main food issue for Buddhists is whether one should be vegetarian. This has been somewhat complicated by the fact that, according to the earliest accounts we have, the Buddha died of a stomach ailment apparently caused or aggravated by eating pork. Buddhist vegetarians have sometimes considered this fact scandalous and denied it, but it is consistent with what we know about the early Buddhist community.

According to the Vinaya rules established and followed by the Buddha himself, Theravada monastics are mendicants. Being dependent on what is donated to them, they are not required to be vegetarian -- with an important restriction often followed by devout laypeople as well: "If a monastic sees, hears or suspects that [meat or fish] has been killed for his sake, he may not eat it." Such practices are not required of non-monastics. Not observing them may create bad karma, but that is one's own decision.

What, if anything, do these attitudes imply about genetically modified food?

There is a problem with any absolute claim that genetically modified food does not accord with Buddhist teachings: there's little if any support for the position that "unnatural is bad" in any early Buddhist text. That's because Buddhism does not romanticize nature or "being natural." Our distinctively Western ambivalence between infatuation with technological progress, and nostalgia for a return-to-nature, is not characteristic of Asian Buddhism.

Here it is helpful to remember the three "basic facts," according to Buddhism: dukkha (suffering or "dis-ease"), impermanence, and not-self.

Impermanence means that everything arises and passes away according to conditions, including ourselves. Socially, this implies an openness to change, including progress -- if it really is progress, that is, an improvement. New technologies are not in themselves a problem, for the important issue is their effects on our dukkha. Buddhism is not nostalgic for some prelapsarian time when life was "natural," because there never was such a golden age.

In contrast, not-self involves realizing that nothing self-exists -- not only because there is no permanence, but also because everything is interdependent on everything else. This fact does not discriminate between naturally-occurring things and more technological ones: nothing has any reality of its own, because nothing is on its own. In effect, everything is part of everything else.

If we don't need to worry about disrupting genetic "essences" such as the DNA of a plant or animal species, doesn't that liberate us to do whatever we want technologically? Not quite, because the most important criterion for Buddhism remains the consequences of any GMO for dukkha "suffering": does it tend to reduce dukkha, or increase it?

In general, the genetic modifications that I am aware of seem designed more for the convenience of the food industry than for the benefit of consumers. The focus has been on growing and processing food more efficiently and profitably, rather than on taste or nutrition. Prominent examples are sterile "terminator seeds" and Roundup Ready crops engineered to be resistant to Monsanto's own brand of herbicide. In a controversial 1998 British experiment, Arpad Pusztai reported that genetically modified potatoes caused immune system damage to rats; his results have been criticized but have also been defended by other scientists. In 2000 StarLink corn, with a built-in insecticide and a protein indigestible to humans, was accidentally released into the human food chain, leading to 37 reports of serious allergic reactions.

These and many other incidents are discussed in Kathleen Hart's book Eating in the Dark: America's experiment with genetically engineered food. Such issues suggest what Buddhist emphasis on interdependence implies: that altering the genome of food plants (and no doubt that of animals as well) is an extraordinarily challenging process with many consequences that are very difficult to anticipate and evaluate exhaustively. Producing safe and nutritious food appears to be more complicated than providing most other consumer products.

Perhaps this helps to explain why the European Union does not allow most GMO foodstuffs to be sold in Europe. The technological modification of plant and animal species, without a much better understanding of how all the genomes of living creatures affect each other, is an especially important example of how our technical ambitions can outrun our wisdom.

In short, the genetic engineering of food, as presently practiced, may be incompatible with basic Buddhist teachings, insofar as it is more likely to increase dukkha than reduce it.

This does not necessarily mean that genetic modification of food is always a bad thing. From a Buddhist point of view, most technologies are neither good nor bad in themselves. Nor are they neutral. That is because technologies cannot be separated from the larger social, economic, and ecological contexts within which they are devised and applied. Since Buddhism does not privilege "the natural," including the natural selection that drives the evolutionary process, there is the possibility that in the future some GMO might actually serve to reduce dukkha. For that to happen, however, it's essential that the evaluation process not be distorted by other, more problematic motivations that make it more likely to increase dukkha.]]>The Living Death of Being Unknowntag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.52762182014-05-07T14:58:26-04:002014-07-07T05:59:03-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/really famous, like an A-list movie star?

Of course, fame is often convertible into other things that we crave: money (selling your story to the newspapers), sex (admirers throwing themselves at you), power (for actors and politicians). But what's enjoyable about being so well-known that you can't walk down a sidewalk without the risk of being mobbed?

You might enjoy such attention the first few times, yet the need to protect yourself would sooner or later make it burdensome, and sometimes dangerous. Not everyone will be satisfied to admire you from afar. You can't simply turn off your celebrity when it is inconvenient, because it doesn't belong to you. Your appearance, words, and actions are publicly available and scrutinized. Famous people can't help getting caught up in our fantasies about who they (and we) are. People relate not to you but to what you mean for them. Remember what happened to John Lennon?

Lennon's kind of fame is a relatively recent development. It requires modern media such as newspapers, television, and now the internet. Of course, since the beginning of civilization there have been some famous people, usually rulers and conquerors. Kings had bards to compose songs celebrating their achievements, to record their exploits for posterity. There were also religious leaders such as Jesus and the Buddha. One of the most famous figures in pre-modern Europe was Saint Francis of Assisi. He was renowned because of his sanctity--that is, his close relationship with God. His fame was a side-effect of what he was believed to be.

What was life like for all the other people during his time who were not famous? Today we take for granted a longing for personal fame, yet according to historians medieval people had no such desire. So why has the prospect of fame become so seductive to us? Why are so many of us eager to make fools of ourselves on "reality" TV shows? And why are the rest of us so keen to watch them?

New technologies offer new possibilities. It's no coincidence that the modern world began roughly the same time as the printing press. Print offered not only a new medium for fame but also a new kind of fame: the bestselling author. As with Saint Francis, Shakespeare's reputation was a side-effect of something else--in his case, an unparalleled literary imagination.

Today, however, we have celebrities: people who are famous for being famous, since most of us have forgotten how they became famous. No one questions this because fame is now accepted as an end in itself. Celebrities continue to be celebrated because the media need them as much as they need the media.

In the last century the number of famous people has proliferated because everyday life has become so much more dominated by the digital media, which now function as our collective nervous system. At the same time, desire for fame has become so ubiquitous that we no longer notice it, any more than fish see the water they swim in. It has infiltrated all the corners of our culture, even Christmas carols ("Then how the reindeer loved him/ As they shouted out in glee,/ 'Rudolf the red-nosed reindeer/ You'll go down in history!'").

What does this fascination with celebrity mean for those of us who aren't famous? How has it affected our own self-image? We can't make sense of it unless we consider the alternative. We don't understand the attraction of fame until we realize what is unattractive about being not-famous. In a culture so permeated by print and images, where the media now determine what is real and what is not, being anonymous amounts to being no one at all. To be unknown is to feel like we are nothing, for our lack of being is constantly contrasted with all those real people whose images dominate the screen, and whose names keep appearing in the newspapers and magazines. In his book The Frenzy of Renown, Leo Braudy sums it up well: "the essential lure of the famous is that they are somehow more real than we and that our insubstantial physical reality needs that immortal substance for support . . . because it is the best, perhaps the only, way to be."

If self-justifying fame is the way to become more real, then one way to become real is to be really bad. "How many times do I have to kill before I get a name in the paper or some national attention?" wrote one serial killer to the Wichita police. Only with his sixth murder, he complained, had he begun to get the publicity he deserved. According to Braudy such fame "promises acceptability, even if one commits the most heinous crime, because thereby people will finally know who you are, and you will be saved from the living death of being unknown."

People in low-tech medieval times had their own problems, but the living death of being unknown was not one of them. Since fame was not really possible except for a very few, anonymity was not the curse that it has become for us. But what makes that person on the screen seem more real to us, if not that we're all looking at her?

The basic problem is that preoccupation with fame plugs all too easily into the sense of lack that haunts our (deluded sense of) separate self. Being a construct means that the sense of self is ungrounded and therefore insecure. That it's a product of psychological and social conditioning means that the self develops in response to the attention of others, especially parents, siblings, and friends. Even as adults, therefore, we quite naturally try to reassure ourselves with the approbation of other people. Even much of the value of money for us is due to its supposed effects on the opinion of others. As much as Donald Trump may enjoy his wealth, he obviously craves public admiration as much.

One difference between medieval people and us is that they believed in a different kind of salvation. If they lived as God wanted them to, he would take care of them. Today fewer people believe in God or an afterlife, which makes us more susceptible to secular solutions that promise to fill up our sense of lack right now.

The irony of a celebrity-obsessed culture is that, whether you're famous or a nobody, you are equally trapped if fame is important to you--that is, if it's your way to become more real.

If I'm not famous, I will worry about remaining that way. If I am famous, I will also worry about remaining that way--that is, about losing my fame. Although the media need celebrities they are readily replaced. Even if my celebrity continues, I can never be famous enough--because no one can ever be famous enough, any more than (as the Duchess of Windsor famously said) one can ever be rich enough or thin enough. When fame symbolizes becoming more real, disappointment or disillusionment is inevitable. No amount of fame can ever satisfy if it's really something else that I am seeking from it, which it cannot provide.

As Lewis Lapham put it, "Because the public image comes to stand as the only valid certification of being, the celebrity clings to his image as the rich man clings to his money--that is, as if to life itself." Yet there are wealthy people who do not cling to their money, and some people are not attached to their fame.

For example, the Dalai Lama has received the Nobel Peace Prize, perhaps humanity's highest honor, yet he provides an admirable example of how fame, like money, can be valuable when employed as a skillful means. He is such a fine Dharma teacher because he has evidently not been personally affected by his reputation as Buddhism's foremost Dharma teacher.]]>What Would the Buddha Do?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.50850012014-04-04T18:58:15-04:002014-06-04T05:59:02-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/
Although our globalizing economic system is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the biosphere, most of the CEOs who supervise it (as much as anyone controls it) can't seem to plan much further than the next quarterly report, anymore than most politicians can think further than the next election. Overpopulation and the deprivation of basic necessities for vast numbers of people threaten social breakdown, while the mainstream media -- profit-making enterprises whose primary focus is the bottom-line, rather than exposing the truth -- distract us with infotainment and assurances that the solution to our problems is more of the same -- accelerating consumerism and a growing GNP.

The Cold War has been replaced by a never-ending "war on terror" that means never-ending profits for a bloated military-industrial complex that needs to keep finding enemies. And the latest Supreme Court decision on campaign finance, opening the floodgates for yet more money to distort the democratic process, reminds us yet again that the system is truly broken. The gap between rich and poor continues to widen.

Such is the critical situation we find ourselves in today, and Buddhists, like everyone else, need to face up to it quickly. If you are not at least dimly aware of these urgent problems, then either you are not paying attention or something is wrong with your ability to see. I suspect there is a special place in hell (the Buddhist hells as well as the Christian ones) reserved for those who refuse to give up the self-centered indifference that allows them to meditate indefinitely on their cushions while the rest of the world goes to hell. Our practice needs to extend beyond our sitting cushions and Dharma practice halls, to embrace a broader understanding of what is happening in our world, to our world. Like Kwan Yin, we need to hear and respond to its pain.

Sometimes we think that Buddhist practice means "just seeing, just hearing, just feeling is good! -- concepts are bad." There are times and places when we need to focus on immediate sensory and mental phenomena. Nevertheless, such meditation by itself is not enough. If our Buddhist practice makes us allergic to all concepts and abstractions, then we should visit the arctic ourselves, to observe the disappearing ice and melting permafrost, and the slums of Mumbai and Nairobi to see how families survive there, and Iraq to learn what "bringing democracy to the Middle East" really means . . . and lots of other places as well.

Those of us who do not have the money or time for such travels need to develop wider awareness in other ways, which do not rely on junk media or political and corporate spin machines. We must employ our critical faculties to understand the challenges facing us today. Concepts and generalizations are not bad in themselves. Rejecting them entirely is like blaming the victim, for the problem is the ways we misuse them.

Believing that mindfulness means attentiveness only to my immediate surroundings, and placing such limits on our awareness, amounts to another version of the basic problem: our sense of disconnection from each other and from the world we are "in." Anatta, the Buddhist teaching of "not-self," means that it is delusive to separate "my own best interests" from those of others. As the law of karma implies, the world is not that kind of zero-sum game.

Two other Buddhist responses attempt to justify focusing solely on one's own practice and awakening: "I must tend to my own liberation before I can be of service to others" and "From the highest point of view all living beings are 'empty,' so we needn't worry about their fate, or that of the biosphere." Neither of these answers will do, because both are half-truths at best.

To begin with, we can't wait until we have overcome all our own suffering before addressing that of others. Events are speeding up, and they are not going to wait for you and me to attain great enlightenment. If even the Buddha is only halfway there (according to the Zen saying), we need to do what we can according to who we are right now, including where we are in our practice right now.

Moreover, this objection misunderstands how spiritual practice works. We don't wait until we overcome our self-centeredness before engaging with the world; addressing the suffering of the wider world is how we overcome our self-centeredness. Contrary to a common way of understanding the bodhisattva path, bodhisattvas don't defer their own perfect enlightenment in order to help others; helping others is how they perfect their enlightenment. We awaken from our own self-suffering into a world full of suffering, with the realization I am not separate from that world.

But it's all empty, right? Yes and no. To focus only on shunyata "emptiness" is to misunderstand the basic teaching of Mahayana. Although form is emptiness, emptiness is also form, as the Heart Sutra emphasizes. The point of our practice is not simply to rest serenely in emptiness, but to appreciate that the things of this world (including ourselves) are how it "presences." Not to cherish the intricate web of life that the earth has miraculously spun is to denigrate the wondrous activity of the essential nature that we share with all other beings.

Awakening is not about attaining another reality or transcendent state of consciousness; it is realizing our essential nonduality with the world (which is also to realize the emptiness of our own self-being), and acting accordingly. Without healthy societies, the possibilities for fulfilling human activity, including the path to enlightenment, are damaged. Without a healthy biosphere, those possibilities may be destroyed.

What would the Buddha do? Is the answer that we can't know, because he's not here? If the Buddha doesn't live in us and as us, he is dead indeed. If Buddhists are unable to answer that question, Buddhism is dead--or might as well be. The urgent and inescapable challenge is determining how to apply the most important Buddhist teachings to our present situation. If those teachings do not help us to understand and address the global crises we face today, so much the worse for those teachings.

Of course, I do not think that is what is called for. The most distinctive Buddhist teaching is also the one that gives us the most insight into the collective crises confronting us: the relationship between suffering (in the broadest sense) and the delusive sense of a self that feels disconnected from others. Such a self is inherently uncomfortable, because always insecure, and the ways it often tries to secure itself (to feel more "real") tend to make things worse. This essential truth about the individual self is just as revealing about "collective selves," which also try to secure themselves by promoting their own group self-interest at the price of other groups. This gets to the heart of why sexism, racism, nationalism, militarism, and species-ism (our alienation from the other beings of the biosphere) are self-defeating. If sense of separation is the problem, embracing interdependence must be at the heart of any solution.

Interdependence is not merely an insight to be cultivated on our cushions. A suffering world calls upon us to realize interdependence--to make it real--in the ways we actually live. If Buddhists do not want to do this or cannot find ways to do this, then Buddhism is not the spiritual path that the world needs today.]]>Awareness Bound and Unboundtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.48812842014-03-03T15:34:12-05:002014-05-03T05:59:01-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/Diamond Sutra)

The Platform Sutra makes the same point: "When our mind works freely without any hindrance, and is at liberty to 'come' or to 'go,' we attain liberation." Such a mind "is everywhere present, yet it 'sticks' nowhere." Our awareness becomes stuck when we identify with particular forms, due to ignorance of the essential non-dwelling nature of our consciousness.

These are familiar Buddhist teachings, yet an important implication is not usually noticed: the danger of collective attention-traps. We tend to have similar problems because we are subjected to similar conditioning. What do contemporary societies do to encourage the constriction or liberation of awareness?

These questions are important because today our awareness is affected in at least three ways that did not afflict previous Buddhist cultures: fragmented by new information and communication technologies, commodified by advertising, consumerism and
manipulated with sophisticated propaganda techniques.

The Fragmentation of Attention

Media coverage suggests that one of our major concerns about attention is the lack thereof. Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder has become a serious medical issue. Last November the Center for Disease Control said that rates among children have increased 42 percent over the last decade; more than 20 percent of 11-year-old boys have been diagnosed with ADHD at some point in their lives. Diagnoses among adults are also rising quickly.

It's not clear why this is happening, but one likely factor is new technologies.

Buddhist practice evokes images of meditation with minimal distractions. The IT revolution -- personal computers, the internet, email, cellphones, mp3 players, etc. -- encourages an unremitting connectivity that pulls us in the opposite direction. As we become attentive to so many more possibilities always available, is less attention available for the people and things most important to us?

TV channel and internet-surfing, video-games, Amazon one-click orders of books. Our old foraging habits were based on info-scarcity, but suddenly, like Mickey Mouse the sorcerer's apprentice, we find ourselves trying to survive an info-glut, and the scarcest resources have become attention and control over our own time. Thomas Eriksen has formalized this relationship into a general law of the information revolution: "When an ever increasing amount of information has to be squeezed into the relatively constant amount of time each of us has at our disposal, the span of attention necessarily decreases."

In place of the usual Buddhist warnings about clinging and attachment, many of us now have the opposite problem: an inability to concentrate on one thing. Yet an attention that jumps from this to that, unable to focus itself, is no improvement over an awareness that is stuck on something.

The Commodification of Attention

For most of us in the developed world, the greatest attention trap is consumerism, which involves sophisticated advertising that has become very good at manipulating our awareness. Today the bigger economic challenge is not production but keeping us convinced that the solution to our dukkha "dis-ease" is our next purchase. According to the pioneering advertising executive Leo Burnett, good advertising does more than circulate information: "It penetrates the public mind with desire and belief." That penetration may have been lucrative for his clients, but there are other consequences, as Ivan Illich pointed out: "In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves, the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy." Whether or not one is able to afford the desired product, one's attention is captured.

In other words, attention has become the basic commodity to be exploited. According to Jonathan Rowe, the key economic resource of this new economy is not something they provide, it's something we provide -- "mindshare." But "what if there's only so much mind to share? If you've wondered how people could feel so depleted in such a prosperous economy, how stress could become the trademark affliction of the age, part of the answer might be here."

A turning point in the development of capitalism was the enclosures in early modern Britain, when villagers were forced out of their villages because landlords found it more profitable to raise sheep. Rowe discusses "the ultimate enclosure -- the enclosure of the cognitive commons, the ambient mental atmosphere of daily life," a rapid development now so pervasive that it has become like the air we breathe unnoticed. Time and space have already been reconstructed: holidays into shopping days, Main Street into shopping malls. Sports stadiums used to have advertisements; now renamed stadiums are themselves ads. TV shows used to be sponsored by ads; today product placement makes the whole show (and many movies) an ad. A 2005 issue of the New Yorker did not include any ads because the whole magazine was a promotion for the retail chain Target. According to one study, two-thirds of three-year-olds recognize the golden arches of McDonald's.

Unless we're meditating in a Himalayan cave, we now have to process thousands of commercial messages every day. As Rowe emphasizes, they do not just grab our attention, they exploit it:

"The attention economy mines us much the way the industrial economy mines the earth. It mines us first for incapacities and wants. Our capacity for interaction and reflection must become a need for entertainment. Our capacity to deal with life's bumps and jolts becomes a need for 'grief counseling' or Prozac. The progress of the consumer economy has come to mean the diminution of ourselves."

Consumerism requires and develops a sense of our own impoverishment. By manipulating the gnawing sense of lack that haunts our insecure sense of self, the attention economy insinuates its basic message deep into our awareness: the solution to any discomfort is consumption.

The Control of Attention

Dictatorships control people with violence and the threat of it, to restrain what they do. Modern democracies control people with sophisticated propaganda, by manipulating what they think. We worry about weapons of mass destruction, but perhaps we should be as concerned about weapons of mass deception (and weapons of mass distraction). The disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq would never have been possible without carefully orchestrated attempts to make the public anxious about dangers that did not exist. It was easy to do because 9/11 made us fearful, and fearful people are more susceptible to manipulation.

Traditionally rulers used religious ideologies to justify their power. In pre-modern Europe the Church supported the "divine right" of kings. In Buddhist societies karma was sometimes used to rationalize the ruler's authority and the powerlessness of his oppressed subjects: your present social status is a consequence of your past deeds. In modern secular societies, however, acquiescence must be molded in different ways.

According to Alex Carey, the twentieth century was characterized by three important political developments: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of propaganda as a way protect corporate power against democracy. Although corporations are not mentioned in the Constitution -- the founding fathers were wary of them -- corporate power began to expand dramatically towards the end of the nineteenth century, so successfully that today there is little effective distinction between major corporations and the federal government. Both identify wholeheartedly with the same goal of continuous economic growth, regardless of its social or ecological effects. We are repeatedly told that any unfortunate consequences from this growth obsession can be solved with more economic growth.

The liberation of collective attention

Who should decide what happens to our attention? Rowe concludes that we need a new freedom movement, to "battle for the cognitive commons. If we have no choice regarding what fills our attention, then we really have no choice at all." From a Buddhist perspective, we also need an alternative understanding of what our attention is and what practices promote its liberation. What does it really mean for awareness to be here-and-now, de-conditioned from attention traps both individual and collective? Is awareness to be valued as a means to some other end, or should we cherish its liberation as the most valuable goal of all?]]>The Earth As Witness: International Dharma Teachers' Statement on Climate Changetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.45983422014-01-21T10:27:49-05:002014-03-23T05:59:01-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/A group of Dharma teachers have issued the following statement describing core Buddhist insights into the root causes of the climate crisis and ways to minimize its potentially tragic consequences. Over 150 Dharma teachers from around the globe have already signed it. The teachers seek the endorsement of the statement by other Dharma teachers and Sangha members worldwide. To sign, access the website at the end of this post.

Today humanity faces an unprecedented crisis of almost unimaginable magnitude. Escalating climate change is altering the global environment so drastically as to force the Earth into a new geological age. Unprecedented levels of suffering for all life on Earth, including human, will result. Significant reductions in greenhouse gases and other actions will be needed to reduce climate change to manageable levels. But more fundamental changes are also needed, and this is where we can draw guidance from the rich resources of the Buddha's teachings, the Dharma. This statement briefly describes core Buddhist insights into the root causes of the climate crisis and suggests ways to minimize its potentially tragic consequences.

As a starting point, the Dharma states that to formulate meaningful solutions to any problem we must first acknowledge the truth of our suffering. As shocking and painful as it may be, we must recognize that without swift and dramatic reductions in fossil fuel use and major efforts to increase carbon sequestration, global temperatures will rise close to or beyond 2 degrees Celsius. This increase will lead to injury and death for millions of people worldwide and the extinction of many of the Earth's species. Millions more will experience severe trauma and stress that threaten their physical, emotional, and psychological well-being. These stresses will, in turn, trigger social and political unrest. In a grave injustice, low-income communities, poor nations, and people systematically subjected to oppression and discrimination, who contributed little to climate change, will initially be harmed the most. Even worse, as frightening as it is, if we fail to make fundamental changes in our energy, manufacturing, transportation, forestry, agricultural, and other systems along with our consumption patterns with utmost urgency, in mere decades irreversible climate shifts will occur that undermine the very pillars of human civilization. Only by recognizing these truths can we adopt a meaningful path toward solutions.

The Dharma teaches us the origin of our suffering. The majority of the world's climate scientists are unequivocal that on the external physical plane climate change is caused by the historic and ongoing use of fossil fuels and the greenhouse gases they generate when burned. Destructive land management practices such as clearing forests also contribute by reducing nature's capacity to sequester carbon. The Dharma informs us, however, that craving, aversion, and delusion within the human mind are the root causes of vast human suffering. Just as these mental factors have throughout history led to the oppression, abuse, and exploitation of indigenous peoples and others outside the halls of wealth and power, craving, aversion, and delusion are also the root causes of climate change. Climate change is perhaps humanity's greatest teacher yet about how these mental forces, when unchecked in ourselves and our institutions, cause harm to other people and the living environment. Led by industrialized nations, the desire for evermore material wealth and power has resulted in the reckless destruction of land and water, excessive use of fossil fuels, massive amounts of solid and toxic waste, and other practices that are disrupting the Earth's climate. However, by acknowledging and addressing these internal mental drivers, we can begin to resolve the external causes of climate change.

The Dharma offers hope by teaching us that it is possible to overcome the detrimental forces of craving, aversion, and delusion. We can use the climate crisis as a catalyst to acknowledge the consequences of our craving for more and more material wealth and the pursuit of power and realize we must change our assumptions, attitudes, and behaviors. We can use the climate crisis as a catalyst to educate ourselves about planetary processes so we understand that the Earth has ecological limits and thresholds that must not be crossed. By learning from our mistaken beliefs and activities, we can create more equitable, compassionate, and mindful societies that generate greater individual and collective wellbeing while reducing climate change to manageable levels.

Finally, the Dharma describes a pathway of principles and practices we can follow to minimize climate change and the suffering it causes. The first principle is wisdom. From this point forward in history we must all acknowledge not only the external causes of climate change, but the internal mental drivers as well, and their horrific consequences. To be wise we must also, individually and as a society, adopt the firm intention to do whatever is necessary, no matter what the cost, to reduce the climate crisis to manageable levels and over time re-stabilize our planet's climate.

The second Dharma principle is ethical conduct, which is rooted in a compassionate concern for all living beings in the vast web of life. We need to make a firm moral commitment to adopt ways of living that protect the climate and help restore the Earth's ecosystems and living organisms. In our personal lives, we should recognize the value of contentment and sufficiency and realize that, after a certain modest level, additional consumption, material wealth, and power will not bring happiness. To fulfill our wider moral responsibility, we must join with others, stand up to the vested interests that oppose change, and demand that our economic, social, and political institutions be fundamentally altered so they protect the climate and offer nurturance and support for all of humanity in a just and equitable manner. We must insist that governments and corporations contribute to a stable climate and a healthy environment for all people and cultures worldwide, now and in the future. We must further insist that specific scientifically credible global emission reduction targets be set and means adopted to effectively monitor and enforce them.

The third Dharma training, and the one that makes all of the others possible, is mindfulness. This offers a way to heighten our awareness of, and then to regulate, our desires and emotions and the thoughts and behaviors they generate. By continually enhancing our awareness, we can increasingly notice when we are causing harm to others, the climate, or ourselves, and strengthen our capacity to rapidly shift gears and think and act constructively. Mindfulness increases awareness of our inherent interdependency with other people and the natural environment and of values that enhance human dignity rather than subordinate people, animals, and nature to the craving for more material wealth and power.

As we each awaken to our responsibility to follow the path described in the Dharma to help us protect and restore the planet and its inhabitants, we may feel awed by the immensity of the challenge. We should take heart, however, in the power of collective action. Buddhists can join with others in their sanghas, and our sanghas can join hands and hearts with other religious and spiritual traditions as well as secular movements focused on social change. In this way we will support each other as we make the necessary shifts in perspectives, lifestyles, and economic and institutional systems required to reduce climate change to manageable levels. History shows that with concerted, unified, collective effort, changes that at one time seemed impossible have time and again come to pass.

When we come together to celebrate our love for the natural world and all of the beings that inhabit it, and when we take a stand to counter the forces of craving, aversion, and delusion, we reclaim our own inner stability and strength and live closer to the truth, closer to the Dharma. Together, we can seek to ensure that our descendants and fellow species inherit a livable planet. Individually and collectively, we will be honoring the great legacy of the Dharma and fulfill our heart's deepest wish to serve and protect all life.

Tolkien's Middle-earth may not seem very susceptible to a Buddhist reading, given its uncompromising dualism between good and evil, and apparent endorsement of violence against evil. It's clear that the only good orc is a dead orc.

Nevertheless, The Lord of the Rings resonates with Buddhist concerns and perspectives, because it is about a special kind of quest. Frodo leaves home not to slay a dragon or win a chest of jewels, but to let go of something. He renounces the Ring not for any selfish purpose, not even to gain enlightenment, yet it nevertheless transforms him profoundly. His journey implies something important about the Buddhist path today.

An Engaged Quest

Frodo does not have his adventures because he wants to have them. He embarks on the quest because it cannot be evaded. The Ring must be destroyed and he is the best one to carry it. There is nothing he hopes to gain from the journey. By the end, he and Sam expect to be destroyed soon after the Ring is cast into the Fire, and that almost happens. Their total renunciation is a powerful metaphor. They let go of all personal ambition, although not the ambition to do what is necessary to help the world.

Frodo's quest is not an attempt to transcend Middle-earth and attain some higher reality. He is simply responding to its needs, which because of historical circumstances (the growing power of Sauron) have become critical, as they have also become for us today, on our beleaguered earth. The larger world has begun to impinge on his (and our) shire. If Frodo were to decline the task and hide at home, he would not escape the dangers that threaten. Is our situation today any different?

So is Frodo's journey a spiritual quest, or a struggle to help the world? In The Lord of the Rings they are the same thing. Frodo real-izes -- makes real -- his own nonduality with the world by doing everything he can to help it. And by doing what he can to transform it, Frodo transforms himself. He becomes selfless. Frodo does not change because he destroys the Ring. He changes because of his determined efforts to destroy the Ring. His early adventures on the road to Rivendell test and toughen him, giving him courage to be the Ringbearer. His own strength of will and heart grows from these encounters, teaching him self-reliance and developing into his unassuming heroic stature.

Gandalf cannot accompany Frodo and Sam all the way. The plot requires him to fall away, so that they can grow into the role they need to play. Gandalf sacrifices himself defending his colleagues and disappears to undergo his own psychic death and resurrection. Appropriately, that occurs deep in the mines of Moria. Is the same true for our own spiritual paths? No matter how wise and compassionate our teachers may be, they cannot walk the path for us. As our meditations take us down into the dark unconscious of our own minds, we disturb our own deepest fears and must face them ourselves.

The Karma of the Rings

Middle-earth is structured karmically: good intentions lead to good results, while evil intentions are self-defeating. This Buddhist-like principle of moral causation is one of the keys to the plot, recurring again and again.

It is easy enough to see how good intentions are rewarded, yet the unsuccessful consequences of bad intentions are just as important. The best example is Gollum. He does not want to help Frodo and Sam. He wants to get his hands on the Ring, and to gain the opportunity to do this, he must help them time and again. When they are lost he leads them to Mordor. When they become stuck, he shows them a mountain path. And at the end, when an exhausted Frodo is no longer able to relinquish the Ring, Gollum appears once more to bite off Frodo's finger - and fall into the fiery pit.

In Middle-earth this karmic law seems to work as inexorably as gravity, but, as we know all too well, karma does not work so neatly in our world. Evil often seems to succeed, at least in the short run; goodness has a harder time prevailing. This reminds us that karma should not be understood as some inevitable calculus of moral cause and effect, because it is not primarily a teaching about how to control what the world does to us. It is about our own spiritual development: how our lives are transformed by transforming our motivations.

That was one of the Buddha's great insights: karma is not something I have, it is what I am, and what I am changes according to what I choose to do. This is implied by the Buddhist emphasis on non-self. My sense of self is a product of habitual ways of thinking, feeling and acting. Just as my body is composed of the food I eat, so my character is constructed by my conscious choices. People are "punished" or "rewarded" not for what they have done but for what they have become, and what we intentionally do is what makes us what we are. To become a different kind of person is to experience the world in a different way. When your mind changes, the world changes. And when you respond differently to the world, the world usually responds differently to you.

The Karma of Power

What is the Ring? Its magnetic-like attraction is a profound symbol for the karma of power. We think we use the Ring, but when we use it, it is actually using us, and transforming us. Power corrupts, and the absolute power of the Ring corrupts absolutely.

Power wants to be used. The Ring has a will of its own. It gets heavier. It wants Frodo to slip it on his finger. If he did this, though, it would corrupt him, as it corrupted Sauron and Gollum. Gollum is Frodo's alter ego, a constant reminder to Frodo of what he could become.

In The Lord of the Rings lust for power motivates the greed, ill will and delusions that drive the plot. Sauron rules a totalitarian and imperialistic state. Saruman transforms his domain into a fearsome military machine. Defeated, he slinks off to the shire, where he introduces an ecologically destructive industrial revolution. These are the three enemies that are fought and defeated. But are they the same thing: different expressions of the will to power over Middle-earth and its creatures?

In our world, too, it is not so much physical craving as lust for power that motivates the greed, ill will and delusion now endangering the earth and our societies. People have always craved power, but our situation has become grave today because, due to new technologies, there is so much more power to crave and use. And, due to modern institutions, that power tends to function in impersonal ways that assume a life of their own.

Our collective attempt to dominate the earth technologically is related to the disappearance of the sacred. If we can no longer rely on God to take care of us, we must secure ourselves, by subduing nature until it meets all our needs and satisfies all of our purposes - which is, of course, never. Because our efforts to exploit the earth's resources are damaging it so much, the fatal irony is that our efforts to secure ourselves may destroy us. Is there a better example of collective karma? We are one with the earth. When the biosphere becomes sick, we become sick. If the biosphere dies, so do we. A technological Ring of Power is not the solution to these problems.]]>The Three Poisons, Institutionalizedtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.42932452013-11-19T11:55:14-05:002014-01-23T18:58:21-05:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/dukkha "suffering" results.

Today we not only have much more powerful technologies, we also have much more powerful institutions, which operate according to their own logic and motivations. Those can be quite different from the personal motivations of the people who work for them.

This Buddhist emphasis on motivation can provide a different perspective on some of our most important social structures. Arguably, our present economic system institutionalizes greed, our militarism institutionalizes ill will, and the corporate media institutionalize delusion.

Institutionalized Greed

If greed is defined as "never having enough," that also applies collectively: corporations are never large enough or profitable enough, their share value is never high enough, our GNP is never big enough... In fact, we cannot imagine what "big enough" might be. It is built into these systems that they must keep growing, or else they tend to collapse. But why is more always better if it can never be enough?

Consider the stock market, high temple of the economic process. On one side are many millions of investors, most anonymous and unconcerned about the details of the companies they invest in, except for their profitability and share prices. In many cases investors do not know where their money is invested, thanks to mutual funds. Such people are not evil, of course: investment is a highly respectable endeavor, and successful investors are highly respected, even idolized ("the sage of Omaha").

On the other side of the market, however, the desires and expectations of those millions of investors become transformed into an impersonal and unremitting pressure for growth and increased profitability that every CEO must respond to, and preferably in the short run.

Consider, for example, the CEO of a large transnational corporation, who one morning suddenly awakens to the dangers of climate change and wants to do everything he (it's usually a he) can to address this challenge. But if what he tries to do threatens corporate profits, he is likely to lose his job. And if that is true for the CEO, how much more true it is for everyone else down the corporate hierarchy. Corporations are legally chartered so that their first responsibility is not to their employees or customers, nor to the members of the societies they operate within, nor to the ecosystems of the earth, but to their stockholders, who with few exceptions are concerned only about return on investment.

Who is responsible for this collective fixation on growth? The point is that this system has its own in-built motivations, quite apart from the motivations of the employees who will be replaced if they do not serve that institutional motivation. And all of us participate in this process in one way or another, as employees, consumers, investors, pensioners, and so forth, although with very little (if any) sense of personal responsibility for the collective result. Any awareness of what is actually happening tends to be diffused in the impersonal anonymity of this economic process.

Institutionalized Ill Will

One example of institutionalized ill will is our punitive legal system, which incarcerates vast numbers of people, mostly poor and colored (white-collar criminals rarely end up in prison for long). But the "best" example is our militarism. Measured by the power of our military forces, and the resources devoted to them, we live in the most militarized society ever. Each year we lavish as much money on our armed forces as the next fifteen largest nations combined. If Iraq and Afghanistan are included, military spending in 2011 was $1,165,907,000,000, according to one widely-cited computation. The need to "defend ourselves" apparently requires well over 700 overseas military installations, and more than 900 domestic ones. No wonder there's so little left for education and social services.

To justify that expense, our military needs an enemy. The end of the Cold War with the Soviet bloc created a big problem, but the "war on terror" solved it. It is already by far the longest war in our history, and may never come to an end: using drones to assassinate suspects, along with any other people who happen to be nearby, ensures that we continue to produce a dependable supply of angry people who have good reason to hate us. If terrorism is the war of the poor and disempowered, war is the terrorism of the rich.

Institutionalized Delusion

"The Buddha" literally means "the awakened one," which implies that the rest of us are unawakened. Each of us lives inside our own dream-like bubble of delusions, which distorts our perceptions and expectations. Buddhist practitioners are familiar with this problem, yet we also dwell together within a much bigger bubble that largely determines how we collectively understand the world and ourselves. The institution most responsible for molding our collective sense of self is the media, which have become our "international nervous system."

Genuine democracy requires an independent and activist press, to expose abuse and discuss political issues. In the process of becoming mega-corporations, however, the major media have abandoned all but the pretense of objectivity. Since they are profit-making institutions whose bottom-line is advertising revenue, their main concern is to do whatever maximizes those profits. It is never in their own interest to question the grip of consumerism.

An important part of genuine education is realizing that many of the things we think are natural and inevitable (and therefore should accept) are in fact conditioned (and therefore can be changed). The world doesn't need to be the way it is; there are other possibilities. The present role of the media is to foreclose most of those possibilities by confining public awareness and discussion within narrow limits. With few exceptions, the world's developed (or "economized") societies are now dominated by a power elite composed of governments and large corporations including the major media. People move seamlessly from each of these institutions to the other, because there is little difference in their worldview or goals: primarily economic expansion. Politics remains "the shadow cast by big business over society," as John Dewey once put it. The role of the media in this unholy alliance is to "normalize" this situation, so that we accept it and continue to perform our required roles, especially the frenzied production and consumption necessary to keep the economy growing.

It's important to realize that we are not being manipulated by a clever group of powerful people who benefit from manipulating us. Rather, we are being manipulated by a deluded group of powerful people who think they benefit from it--because they buy into the basic illusion that their own well-being is separate from that of other people. They too are victims of their own propaganda, caught up in the webs of collective delusion that include virtually all of us. As the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus once said, "How do wars begin? Politicians tell lies to journalists, then believe what they read in the newspapers." The same applies to shared fantasies such as the necessity of consumerism and perpetual economic growth, and collective repressions such as denial of impending eco-catastophe.

A Social Awakening?

If the Buddha is correct that greed, ill will, and delusion are the causes of our suffering, and if we have indeed institutionalized them, these are matters for deep and urgent concern. Has awakening to the nature of these three institutional poisons become just as important as the individual awakening that Buddhism traditionally emphasizes?]]>The "Lack" of Moneytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.40612792013-10-09T09:18:44-04:002014-01-23T18:58:21-05:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/
What is a dollar bill? A piece of paper. You can't eat it, ride in it, or sleep on it. The same is true of digits in bank accounts. In and of itself, money is literally worthless, in effect nothing. Yet money is also the most valuable thing in the world, because we have collectively decided to make it so. It is our socially agreed, and legally enforced, symbol of value. The anthropologist Weston LaBarre called it a psychosis that has become normal, "an institutionalized dream that everyone is having at once." A dream that sometimes turns into a nightmare.

The danger is that psychologically means and ends are reversed, so that the means becomes the goal. As Schopenhauer put it, money is abstract happiness, so someone who is no longer capable of concrete happiness sets his whole heart on money. Remember Midas and his golden touch? That profound myth is even more significant today, because our world is so much more monetarized than that of classical Greece. Money ends up becoming "frozen desire" - not desire for anything in particular, but desire in general. Money symbolizes the possibility of acquiring anything we want, and since the satisfaction of all desire is how we usually think of happiness, money comes to symbolize the possibility of acquiring happiness. This way of thinking is often unconscious, but it's no less compulsive for that.

Nowadays, of course, Midas is socially acceptable - in fact, there is at least a bit of Midas in most of us. Living in a world that emphasizes instant convertibility tends to de-emphasize our senses, in favor of the magical numbers in bank accounts, or the symbolic value of our expensive possessions. Instead of appreciating fully the sensuous qualities of a glass of wine, we are more conscious of how much it costs and what that implies about us as sophisticated wine-drinkers.

Today money serves at least four functions for us. Because it is so indispensable as the medium of exchange, it has also evolved into our storehouse of value. Once wealth was measured in cows, granaries, and servants and children, but the advantage of gold and silver--now paper bills and bank accounts--is that they are imperishable, at least in principle. Gold doesn't even tarnish. It is, in effect, immortal. This is quite attractive in a world haunted by impermanence and death.

Capitalism added an addictive little twist, which we take for granted today but which was suspicious, not to say immoral, to many people in the past. Capitalism is, of course, an economy based on capital -- money that is used to make more money. This encouraged an economic dynamism that has been quite extraordinary. The downside is always re-investing whatever you get to get even more, the assumption being that you can never have too much.

Psychologically this tends to become: you can never have enough. If, as the Duchess of Windsor said, one can never be too thin or too wealthy, it means that one is always too fat and too poor. And of course she's wrong: one can be too thin and one can also be too rich, if it's the result of being obsessed with never having enough. That is a very important factor in aggravating the increasing inequality that threatens to destroy our society. How many meals a day can you eat? How many cars do you need to get around? But capital can always be used to accumulate more capital. Where are you on the Forbes 500 list?

Why do we fall into such obsessions? The anatta "not-self" teaching of Buddhism implies a special perspective on our hang-ups with money. The sense of self is a construct composed of mostly habitual ways of thinking, feeling, acting, reacting, remembering, planning, intending, and so forth. These are processes, not things, which means that the self they compose is inherently insecure: there's nothing substantial there that could be secured. So our sense of self is haunted by a sense of lack: I experience the empty hole at the core of my being as the feeling that something is wrong with me, or something is missing in my life. Usually, however, I don't understand the source of that feeling. Instead, I project it outward and become obsessed with projects that I believe can make me feel more "real" - such as acquiring piles of money, and all the goodies they can buy.

This points to the fourth function of money: it has become our most important reality symbol, the best way to try to secure one's identity, to cope with the gnawing intuition that we do not really exist. Suspecting that our sense of self is groundless, we used to visit temples and churches to ground ourselves in a relationship with the Divine. Now we open savings accounts and invest in the stock market to ground ourselves economically.

Needless to say, there is a karmic rebound. The more we value money, the more we find it used--and the more we use it ourselves--to evaluate us. We end up being manipulated by the symbol we take so seriously. In this sense, the problem is not that we are too materialistic but that we are not materialistic enough, because we are preoccupied with the symbolism of money. We are infatuated less with the actual things that money can buy than with their power and status--not so much with the comfort and power of an expensive car as with what owning a Maserati sports car says about me. Women buy $10,000 handbags not despite the fact that they are so expensive but because they are so expensive: "I'm the kind of person who owns a Louis Vuitton."

The basic difficulty with that kind of conspicuous consumption is that we are trying to resolve a spiritual problem--the "emptiness" at the core of one's being--by grasping at something outside ourselves, which can never confer the sense of reality we crave. We work hard to acquire a big bank account and all the things that society teaches us will make us happy, and then we cannot understand why they do not resolve our sense that something is lacking. Is the reason that we don't have enough yet?

Another way to make this point is that money too is not a thing but a process. Perhaps it's best understood as an energy that is not really mine or yours. Those who understand that it is a socially-constructed symbol can use it wisely and compassionately. Those who use it to become more real end up being used by it, their alienated sense of self clutching a blank check -- a promissory note that can never be cashed.]]>The Problem With Karmatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.38949872013-09-10T16:33:15-04:002013-11-10T05:12:01-05:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/
It's no use pretending that karma hasn't become a problem for contemporary Buddhism. In many ways Buddhist teachings seem very modern in their emphasis on impermanence and interdependence (evolution, ecology), insubstantiality (physics), the deceptions of language (philosophy), and non-self (developmental psychology). But these similarities do not include karma as an inexorable moral law built into the cosmos. This doesn't mean that the doctrine of karma should be dismissed or ignored, but it does encourage us to interrogate those teachings and ask: what does karma mean for us today?

There are at least two big problems with the ways that karma has often been understood. Although the earliest teachings are quite clear that laypeople too can become enlightened, the main role of lay Buddhists, as widely practiced today, is to support the monastic sangha. In this way non-monastics gain "merit," and by accumulating merit they can hope to attain a more favorable rebirth. This approach commodifies karma into a form of "spiritual materialism," an attitude that is quite different from the path that the Buddha taught.

Karma has also been used to rationalize sexism, racism, caste, economic oppression, birth handicaps, and almost everything else. Taken literally, karma justifies the authority of political elites, who therefore deserve their wealth and power, and the subordination of those without them, who are also experiencing the results of their behavior in previous lifetimes. If there is an inevitable cause-and-effect relationship between one's actions and one's fate, there is no need to work toward social justice, because it's already built into the moral fabric of the universe. So why bother to struggle against injustice?

For these reasons, karma is one of the most important issues for contemporary Buddhism. Is it a fatalistic doctrine, or is an empowering one? In order to understand the Buddha's deep insight, we need to appreciate the originality of his approach.

Karma and rebirth were already widely accepted in pre-Buddhist India, but Brahminical teachings understood karma mechanistically: performing a Vedic sacrifice properly would sooner or later lead to the desired consequences. The Buddha's spiritual revolution transformed this ritualistic approach into a moral principle by focusing on cetana, which means "volitions" or "motivations." As the Dhammapada emphasizes, "Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind, and produced by mind. If one speaks or acts with an impure mind, suffering follows even as the cart-wheel follows the hoof of the ox.... If one speaks or acts with a pure mind, happiness follows like a shadow that never departs."

The term karma literally means "action." According to the popular understanding, the law of karma is a way to get a handle on what will happen to us sometime in the future, but to focus on the eventual consequences of our actions puts the cart (effect) before the horse (action) and misses the revolutionary significance of the Buddha's realization.

Karma is better understood as the key to spiritual development: how our life-situation can be transformed by transforming the motivations of our actions right now. Then karma is not something the self has; rather, it is what the sense of self is, because one's sense of self is transformed by one's conscious choices. Just as my body is composed of the food eaten and digested, so "I" am (re)constructed by my consistent, repeated mental attitudes. By choosing to change what motivates me, I change the kind of person I am.

An anonymous verse expresses this well:

Sow a thought and reap a deed
Sow a deed and reap a habit
Sow a habit and reap a character
Sow a character and reap a destiny

What kinds of thoughts and deeds should be sown? Buddhism traces back our dukkha "suffering" to the three "unwholesome roots" that often motivate our actions: greed, ill will, and delusion. These need to be transformed into their positive counterparts: greed into non-attachment and generosity, ill will into loving-kindness, and the delusion of separate self into the wisdom that realizes our interdependence with others.

From this perspective, we experience karmic consequences not just for what we have done but also for what we have become, and what we intentionally do is what makes us what we are. In other words, we are "punished" not for our "sins" but by them. And, as Spinoza put it: happiness is not the reward for virtue; happiness is virtue itself. To become a different kind of person is to experience the world in a different way. And when we respond differently to the challenges and opportunities the world presents to us, the world responds differently to us.

Our ways of acting involve feedback systems that incorporate other people. People not only notice what we do, they notice why we do it. I may fool people sometimes, yet over time my character becomes revealed as my intentions become obvious. The more I am motivated by greed, ill will, and delusion, the more I must manipulate the world to get what I want, and consequently the more alienated I feel and the more alienated others feel when they realize that they have been manipulated. This mutual distrust encourages both sides to manipulate more.

On the other side, the more my actions are motivated by generosity, loving-kindness, and the wisdom of interdependence, the more I can relax and open up to the world. The more I feel genuinely connected with other people, the less I am inclined to use and abuse them, and consequently the more inclined they will be to trust and open up to me. In such ways, transforming my own motivations not only transforms my own life; it also affects those around me, since I am not separate from them.

This more naturalistic understanding of karma does not exclude the possibility of other, perhaps more mysterious possibilities regarding the consequences of our actions. There may well be other aspects of karmic cause-and-effect that are not so readily understood. What is clear in either case, however, is that karma as how-to-transform-my-life-situation-by-transforming-my-motivations-right-now is not a fatalistic doctrine. Quite the contrary: it is difficult to imagine a more empowering spiritual teaching. We are not enjoined to accept passively the problematic circumstances of our lives. Rather, we are encouraged to improve our situations by addressing them with generosity, loving-kindness and wisdom.]]>Why Buddhism and the West Need Each Othertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.34466162013-07-30T07:51:15-04:002013-09-29T05:12:01-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/The mercy of the West has been social revolution. The mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both.
- Gary Snyder

Another way to put it: the highest ideal of the Western tradition has been to restructure our societies so that they are more socially just. The most important goal for Buddhism is to awaken and (to use the Zen phrase) realize one's true nature, which puts an end to dukkha "suffering" due to the delusion of a separate self. Today it has become more obvious that we need both: not just because these ideals complement each other, but because each project needs the other.

The Western conception of social justice can be traced back to the Abrahamic traditions, particularly the Hebrew prophets, who railed against oppressive rulers for afflicting the poor and powerless. Isaiah, for example, complains about those "who write oppressive laws, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be your spoil, and that you may make the orphans your prey" (Isaiah 10:2). Speaking truth to power, the prophets call for justice for the oppressed, who suffer from what might be called social dukkha.

This Abrahamic emphasis, in combination with the Greek realization that society can be restructured, eventually resulted in our modern concern to pursue social justice by reforming political and economic institutions. This includes not only democracy and labor unions but human rights movements (the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, feminism, LGBT liberation, etc.), none of which have been an important concern of traditional Buddhism. As valuable as these reforms have been, the limitations of such an institutional approach, by itself, are becoming evident. Even the best possible economic and political system cannot be expected to function well if the people using that system are motivated by greed, aggression, and delusion -- the "three poisons" that Buddhism identifies as unwholesome motivations, which need to be transformed into their more positive counterparts: generosity, loving-kindness, and wisdom.

Perhaps this helps us to understand why so many political revolutions have ended up replacing one gang of thugs with another gang. Beginning with the earliest Greek experience, and certainly supported by contemporary U.S. experience, there is plenty of evidence that democracy does not work very well insofar as it simply becomes another system for powerful individuals and groups to manipulate and exploit.

This unfortunate fact suggests that our modern emphasis on social transformation -- restructuring institutions to make them more just -- is necessary but not sufficient. That brings us to the Buddhist focus on personal transformation.

I'm not aware of anything in the history of Buddhism comparable to the Western concern for social justice. Although the karma teaching understands justice as an impersonal moral law built into the cosmos, historically karma has functioned differently. Combined with the doctrine of rebirth, the implication seems to be that we do not need to be concerned about promoting justice, because sooner or later everyone gets what they deserve. In practice, this has often encouraged passivity and acceptance of one's situation, rather than a commitment to promote social justice. According to the Pali Canon, the Buddha was consulted by kings and gave them advice, yet apparently he did not castigate them in the way that the Hebrew prophets did. Nor did the sangha do so after he passed away.

The Buddhist emphasis on dukkha "suffering" provides a better parallel with the Western conception of justice. Historically, Asian Buddhism has focused on individual dukkha and personal karma, a limitation that may have been necessary to survive authoritarian rulers that could and sometimes did repress Buddhist institutions. The Buddha emphasized that what he taught was dukkha and how to end it. Did he have in mind only individual dukkha -- that resulting from our own intentions and actions -- or did he possibly have a wider social vision that also encompassed structural dukkha: the suffering caused by oppressive rulers and unjust institutions? A few scholars such as Trevor Ling and Nalin Swaris have argued that the Buddha may have intended to start a movement that would transform society, rather than merely establish a monastic order with alternative values to the mainstream. Certainly his attitudes toward women and caste were extraordinarily progressive for his day.

In either case, early Buddhism as an institution soon came to an accommodation with the state, relying to some extent on the support of kings and emperors. And if you want to be supported by the powers-that-be, you'd better support the powers-that-be. Because no Asian Buddhist society was democratic, that placed limits on what types of dukkha Buddhist teachers could emphasize. The tradition as it developed did not address the exploitative policies of many rulers, which ultimately could only be resolved with some institutional transformation. On the contrary, the karma-and-rebirth teachings could easily be used, and were used, to legitimate the power of kings and princes, who must be reaping the fruits of their benevolent actions in past lifetimes, and to rationalize the disempowerment of those born poor or disabled, who must be experiencing the consequences of their unskillful actions in previous lifetimes.

The result was that Buddhism survived and thrived, spreading throughout most of Asia and developing its extraordinary collection of contemplative practices that can help us transform ourselves. The emphasis, obviously, has been on the spiritual development of the individual. Whether or not that was completely faithful to the ideals of its founder, today globalizing Buddhism finds itself in a new situation, in most locales no longer subject to oppressive governments, and we also have a much better understanding of the structural causes of dukkha. The globalization of democracy, human rights, and freedom of speech opens the door to new ways of responding to social and institutional dukkha.

Admittedly, some of the implications of such a broader understanding of dukkha, and of a broader responsibility for addressing structural dukkha, are quite radical. They require re-thinking some cherished Buddhist teachings, beginning with karma itself. The conventional Buddhist view of one's own karmic stream as individual and discrete is normally understood to mean that I myself am ultimately responsible for what happens to me: it is the result of my previous (skillful and unskillful) actions. "What terrible personal karma each of those European Jews must have had, to have been born into Nazi Germany! And the dalit untouchables who are still oppressed in India today." But does this amount to blaming the victim? Today we are more aware of the suffering created by political, economic, and military institutions, and the importance of finding ways to address such structural causes of dukkha brings us very close to the Abrahamic concern for social justice.

Another way to express the interrelationship between the Western ideal of social transformation (to address social dukkha) and the Buddhist goal of personal transformation (to address individual dukkha) is in terms of different types of freedom. The emphasis of the modern West has been on individual freedom from oppressive institutions, a prime example being the Bill of Rights appended to the U.S. Constitution. The emphasis of Buddhism (and some other Indian traditions) has been on what might be called psycho-spiritual freedom. Freedom for the self, or freedom from the (ego)self? Today we can see more clearly the limitations of each freedom by itself. What have I gained if I am free from external control but still at the mercy of my own greed, aggression, and delusions? And awakening from the delusion of a separate self will not by itself free me, or all those with whom I remain interdependent, from the dukkha perpetuated by an exploitative economic system and an oppressive government. We need to actualize both ideals to be truly free.

David Loy is part of the Ecobuddhism project.]]>Beyond McMindfulnesstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.35192892013-07-01T10:31:46-04:002013-08-31T05:12:01-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/
The mindfulness revolution appears to offer a universal panacea for resolving almost every area of daily concern. Recent books on the topic include: Mindful Parenting, Mindful Eating, Mindful Teaching, Mindful Politics, Mindful Therapy, Mindful Leadership, A Mindful Nation, Mindful Recovery, The Power of Mindful Learning, The Mindful Brain, The Mindful Way through Depression, The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion. Almost daily, the media cite scientific studies that report the numerous health benefits of mindfulness meditation and how such a simple practice can effect neurological changes in the brain.

The booming popularity of the mindfulness movement has also turned it into a lucrative cottage industry. Business savvy consultants pushing mindfulness training promise that it will improve work efficiency, reduce absenteeism, and enhance the "soft skills" that are crucial to career success. Some even assert that mindfulness training can act as a "disruptive technology," reforming even the most dysfunctional companies into kinder, more compassionate and sustainable organizations. So far, however, no empirical studies have been published that support these claims.

In their branding efforts, proponents of mindfulness training usually preface their programs as being "Buddhist-inspired." There is a certain cachet and hipness in telling neophytes that mindfulness is a legacy of Buddhism -- a tradition famous for its ancient and time-tested meditation methods. But, sometimes in the same breath, consultants often assure their corporate sponsors that their particular brand of mindfulness has relinquished all ties and affiliations to its Buddhist origins.

Uncoupling mindfulness from its ethical and religious Buddhist context is understandable as an expedient move to make such training a viable product on the open market. But the rush to secularize and commodify mindfulness into a marketable technique may be leading to an unfortunate denaturing of this ancient practice, which was intended for far more than relieving a headache, reducing blood pressure, or helping executives become better focused and more productive.

While a stripped-down, secularized technique -- what some critics are now calling "McMindfulness" -- may make it more palatable to the corporate world, decontextualizing mindfulness from its original liberative and transformative purpose, as well as its foundation in social ethics, amounts to a Faustian bargain. Rather than applying mindfulness as a means to awaken individuals and organizations from the unwholesome roots of greed, ill will and delusion, it is usually being refashioned into a banal, therapeutic, self-help technique that can actually reinforce those roots.

Most scientific and popular accounts circulating in the media have portrayed mindfulness in terms of stress reduction and attention-enhancement. These human performance benefits are heralded as the sine qua non of mindfulness and its major attraction for modern corporations. But mindfulness, as understood and practiced within the Buddhist tradition, is not merely an ethically-neutral technique for reducing stress and improving concentration. Rather, mindfulness is a distinct quality of attention that is dependent upon and influenced by many other factors: the nature of our thoughts, speech and actions; our way of making a living; and our efforts to avoid unwholesome and unskillful behaviors, while developing those that are conducive to wise action, social harmony, and compassion.

This is why Buddhists differentiate between Right Mindfulness (samma sati) and Wrong Mindfulness (miccha sati). The distinction is not moralistic: the issue is whether the quality of awareness is characterized by wholesome intentions and positive mental qualities that lead to human flourishing and optimal well-being for others as well as oneself.

According to the Pali Canon (the earliest recorded teachings of the Buddha), even a person committing a premeditated and heinous crime can be exercising mindfulness, albeit wrong mindfulness. Clearly, the mindful attention and single-minded concentration of a terrorist, sniper assassin, or white-collar criminal is not the same quality of mindfulness that the Dalai Lama and other Buddhist adepts have developed. Right Mindfulness is guided by intentions and motivations based on self-restraint, wholesome mental states, and ethical behaviors -- goals that include but supersede stress reduction and improvements in concentration.

Another common misconception is that mindfulness meditation is a private, internal affair. Mindfulness is often marketed as a method for personal self-fulfillment, a reprieve from the trials and tribulations of cutthroat corporate life. Such an individualistic and consumer orientation to the practice of mindfulness may be effective for self-preservation and self-advancement, but is essentially impotent for mitigating the causes of collective and organizational distress.

When mindfulness practice is compartmentalized in this way, the interconnectedness of personal motives is lost. There is a dissociation between one's own personal transformation and the kind of social and organizational transformation that takes into account the causes and conditions of suffering in the broader environment. Such a colonization of mindfulness also has an instrumentalizing effect, reorienting the practice to the needs of the market, rather than to a critical reflection on the causes of our collective suffering, or social dukkha.

The Buddha emphasized that his teaching was about understanding and ending dukkha ("suffering" in the broadest sense). So what about the dukkha caused by the ways institutions operate?

Many corporate advocates argue that transformational change starts with oneself: if one's mind can become more focused and peaceful, then social and organizational transformation will naturally follow. The problem with this formulation is that today the three unwholesome motivations that Buddhism highlights -- greed, ill will, and delusion -- are no longer confined to individual minds, but have become institutionalized into forces beyond personal control.

Up to now, the mindfulness movement has avoided any serious consideration of why stress is so pervasive in modern business institutions. Instead, corporations have jumped on the mindfulness bandwagon because it conveniently shifts the burden onto the individual employee: stress is framed as a personal problem, and mindfulness is offered as just the right medicine to help employees work more efficiently and calmly within toxic environments. Cloaked in an aura of care and humanity, mindfulness is refashioned into a safety valve, as a way to let off steam -- a technique for coping with and adapting to the stresses and strains of corporate life.

The result is an atomized and highly privatized version of mindfulness practice, which is easily coopted and confined to what Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, in their book Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion, describe as an "accommodationist" orientation. Mindfulness training has wide appeal because it has become a trendy method for subduing employee unrest, promoting a tacit acceptance of the status quo, and as an instrumental tool for keeping attention focused on institutional goals.

In many respects, corporate mindfulness training -- with its promise that calmer, less stressed employees will be more productive -- has a close family resemblance to now-discredited "human relations" and sensitivity-training movements that were popular in the 1950s and 1960s. These training programs were criticized for their manipulative use of counseling techniques, such as "active listening," deployed as a means for pacifying employees by making them feel that their concerns were heard while existing conditions in the workplace remained unchanged. These methods came to be referred to as "cow psychology," because contented and docile cows give more milk.

Bhikkhu Bodhi, an outspoken western Buddhist monk, has warned: "absent a sharp social critique, Buddhist practices could easily be used to justify and stabilize the status quo, becoming a reinforcement of consumer capitalism." Unfortunately, a more ethical and socially responsible view of mindfulness is now seen by many practitioners as a tangential concern, or as an unnecessary politicizing of one's personal journey of self-transformation.

One hopes that the mindfulness movement will not follow the usual trajectory of most corporate fads -- unbridled enthusiasm, uncritical acceptance of the status quo, and eventual disillusionment. To become a genuine force for positive personal and social transformation, it must reclaim an ethical framework and aspire to more lofty purposes that take into account the well-being of all living beings.]]>Transcendence or Immanence? Balancing Heaven and Earthtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31660152013-05-13T15:05:37-04:002013-07-13T05:12:01-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/
In early Buddhism the "end of suffering" is nirvana, literally "blown out" or "cooled off." Yet it's not clear what that metaphor means, because the Buddha described nirvana mostly with negatives (the end of craving, ignorance, etc.) and other metaphors (the Shelter, Harbor, Refuge, etc.). His reticence leaves the important question whether nirvana refers to something that transcends this world -- some other dimension or reality -- or whether it describes an experience that is immanent in this world -- a state of being that could perhaps be understood more psychologically, as the end of greed, ill will and delusion in our lives right here and now.

Theravada Buddhism, which bases itself on what it believes to be the original teachings of the Buddha, understands nirvana as an Unconditioned realm that transcends samsara, this world of suffering, craving and ignorance. The ultimate goal is to escape the unsatisfactory world we now live in, by avoiding rebirth into samsara.

Whether or not the duality between this world and some otherworldly goal accurately reflects the original views of the historical Buddha, it is similar to what is found in most of the other spiritual traditions that developed around the same time, during the Axial Age (roughly 800-200 B.C.E.) that gave rise to Vedanta, Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism and Judaism, as well as Pre-Socratic Greek philosophy and Platonism.

The Axial worldview was quite different from that of older empires such as Mesopotamia and Egypt, which believed that the gods related to humanity mainly through a king or emperor at the top of the social pyramid. The authority of such rulers was as much sacred as secular, because they were the only ones directly in touch with the divine realms. The Axial revolution brought about a new relationship between the transcendent and each individual. In fact, this relationship created the individual. Instead of connecting to the divine through a priest-king, now everyone has his or her own personal relationship with God, Brahman, or the Tao. In Buddhist terms, each of us has the possibility of awakening and attaining nirvana. This also implied a circle of empathy and compassion that incorporated everyone else who has a relationship with the sacred.

The most revolutionary aspect of this new relationship was a sacred demand that we transform ourselves. It was no longer enough to fulfill one's social function by supporting the ruler's sacrosanct role: now the transcendent expected each individual to take responsibility for his or her own life. In the Abrahamic traditions this was mainly an ethical requirement that we live according to God's commandments. To risk a further generalization, the emphasis in India was more on liberation from this world of maya, usually translated as illusion. To awaken is to realize the really Real, which is something other than its appearances.

"Give me a place to stand and I shall move the Earth," Archimedes said. Culturally, that leverage has been provided by (our belief in) transcendence, which offered the reflective distance -- the alternative perspective -- necessary to evaluate and try to improve oneself. To paraphrase something Renan wrote, the transcendent is the way that the ideal has made its appearance in human history. The world we live in today -- including our concern for democracy, human rights and social justice -- became possible because of that "other world."

Nevertheless, such cosmological dualism has also been problematic. It became a split within us, between the "higher" part (the soul, rationality) that yearns for escape from this vale of sorrow and the "lower" part that is of the earth (physical bodies and emotions). As the Buddha emphasized, this world is a place of suffering and death. Much of the attraction of the Axial religions, including Buddhism, is that they seem to offer an escape from mortality. Dread of death also explains our degradation of the material world, nature, animals, our bodies, sex and women (who remind us that we are conceived and born like other mammals). We don't want to perish: We want to be immortal souls that can qualify for heaven! Or no-selves that might attain nirvana. All the Axial spiritual traditions were or became patriarchal: the hierarchy between higher and lower worlds became reproduced in the hierarchy of men over women.

The problem with those approaches today, of course, is that science has not discovered anything that supports such cosmological dualisms, which may have outlived their role.

Largely in reaction, a this-worldly alternative has become widespread in contemporary Buddhism: understanding the path as a program of psychological development to help us deal with personal problems, especially one's "monkey mind" and afflictive emotions. The aim is to gain insight into how our minds work, in order to make our lives less stressful.

Although this is a beneficial development in many ways, what we might call the "psychologization" of Buddhism tends to de-emphasize its ethical precepts, community life and awakening itself, all of which are central aspects of Buddhism in its Asian context. This is especially true of the mindfulness movement, which extracts one technique from a tradition that has so much more to offer, including a deeper transformative insight into one's true nature.

Without denigrating such practices, we need to ask: Do psychological and mindfulness approaches help to develop an awakened society that pursues social and ecological justice? How do they address the challenge of growth-oriented corporations that are damaging the sustainability of life on Earth? Is Western Buddhism being commodified into a self-help and stress-reduction program that does not raise questions about consumerism and our dysfunctional economic system, but helps us adapt to them?

Beyond Transcendence and Immanence

If transcendence encourages dis-identifying from our lives here, because focused on escaping this world, psychological appropriations of Buddhism (including the mindfulness movement) tend to accept this world as it is -- to presuppose the prevalent, Western-derived worldview about who we are, what the world really is, and our role within it.

Do both miss the point? Buddhist awakening is a profoundly transformative realization that this world as we usually experience it, including the way that I usually experience myself, is neither real nor unreal, but a psychological/social/linguistic construction that can be deconstructed and reconstructed, which is what the spiritual path is about.

The most problematical aspect of this construct is the sense of myself as a being separate from the rest of the world. Because it has no substantiality or reality of its own, the sense of an "I" that feels separate from others is inherently insecure and anxious.

Awakening, from this perspective, is not an escape from this suffering world, nor a grudging acceptance of its existential and social realities, but letting-go of oneself (Dogen calls it "forgetting yourself") and "falling into" the world, to realize one's nonduality with it. Meditation enables this process, because we let-go of the mostly habitual ways of thinking, feeling, etc., that normally work together to sustain one's sense of self.

As Nisargadatta put it:

When I look inside and see that I am nothing, that's wisdom. When I look outside and see that I am everything, that's love. Between these two my life turns.

If there is no inside (my mind), the outside (external world) is not outside! Wisdom and compassion: the two wings of the dharma.

This way of understanding enlightenment has important implications. If awakening involves transcending this suffering world, we can ignore its problems. If the Buddhist path is psychological therapy, we can focus on our own problems. But both of those approaches reinforce the illusion -- the basic problem -- that I am separate from others, and therefore can be indifferent to what they are experiencing.

Then the bodhisattva path is simply a more developed stage of personal practice. One learns to live in a way that embodies what has been realized. There is no individual salvation from the ecological and social crises that confront us today. They are just as much spiritual crises, because they challenge us to wake up and realize that our own well-being cannot be separated from the well-being of others, or from the health of the whole Earth.

David Loy advises the Ecobuddhism project.]]>The Three Nuclear Poisonstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29835342013-04-01T13:10:04-04:002013-06-01T05:12:01-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/"Because of the persistent threat of radioactive materials to the well-being of all sentient beings, the development and use of nuclear power plants is prohibited." -- The Buddha

You didn't know that nuclear power was forbidden by the Buddha? Of course there's no record of him saying anything like the above. His silence on this issue probably has something to do with the fact that he was born almost 2500 years ago in northeast India, into an Iron Age civilization.

Does this mean that Buddhism has nothing to contribute to the debate over nuclear energy? Another possibility is that Buddhist teachings have important implications that can help us understand our situation today.

Nuclear power has its own advantages and disadvantages, so the issue is how to evaluate them, and how they compare with other energy sources. What does this have to do with Buddhism? The Buddha said that all he had to teach is dukkha ("suffering") and how to end it. So one way to frame the evaluation is to ask what types of dukkha is nuclear power likely to reduce (carbon emissions into the atmosphere) and what other types of dukkha it is likely to promote (e.g., accidents such as Fukushima).

What causes dukkha? The four noble truths single out tanha "craving," but the Buddha also emphasizes the "three poisons": lobha (greed), dosa (aggression), and moha (delusion). When our actions are motivated by them, dukkha usually results.

This fits in well with the Buddha's revolutionary understanding of karma, which emphasizes the intentions behind what we do. Habitual expressions of greed, aggression and delusion often end up forming one's character and causing persistent problems.

What creates karma is not just motivation by itself, unacted upon, but intentional action. To make intelligent decisions we also need to evaluate carefully the likely results. But even here motivations are often a factor, because they influence how objectively we assess the possible consequences. Those who support off-shore drilling for oil usually see fewer ecological risks than environmentalists do, and the Fukushima disaster has reminded us that the same is true for nuclear power companies. That's why it's so important to become more aware of what actually motivates us.

What does this have to do with evaluating the benefits and pitfalls of nuclear power? It does not mean focusing on the personal motivations of the individual people involved in the industry. Instead, we are challenged to extend the basic Buddhist teachings about karma and dukkha into a new context.

Today we have not only more powerful technologies such as nuclear power (and nuclear weapons), but also much more powerful institutions that control them, which are socially structured in such a way that they take on a life of their own. And if institutions attain a life of their own, does it also mean that they have their own motivations? That brings us to the crucial question: Can we detect institutionalized greed, aggression, and delusion in the promotion of nuclear power?

In considering the possible role of greed, it's not enough to emphasize the role of the profit motive. We also need to consider the vast quantities of cheap and convenient energy that we enjoy. Why do we "need" so much? Because we take for granted an extraordinarily wasteful and (from that perspective) inefficient economic system, which emphasizes consumerism.

One of the main arguments for nuclear energy is that, although nuclear plants are prohibitively expensive and slow to build, they can most reliably supply the massive amounts of electricity we need. But a society less consumerist could flourish on much less energy. If greed is understood as "never enough," the issue of whether to rely on nuclear power is inevitably connected with greed both on the consumer side and on the producer side. Is an economic system that depends on constant growth -- that needs to expand if it's not to collapse -- really compatible with the finite ecosystems of the biosphere? And does consumerism really make us happy?

When we think of aggression (or "ill will"), it's usually some sort of overt violence that comes to mind, but social critics have coined the term "structural violence" to describe the way that violence doesn't always need to be explicit; the threat of violence can be as oppressive. Then do nuclear power plants embody structural aggression? A nuclear plant can be built without any intention to harm anyone, but what if it is nonetheless likely to cause serious harm to vast numbers of living beings in the future?

One part of the argument is that serious accidents, with horrific consequences, have always happened and will continue to happen, because the factors that cause such incidents cannot be avoided. After every Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima disaster, we always hear some excuse from the nuclear industry about why that was an exception, and that it can't happen again. Yet it will continue to happen again, because human error cannot be eliminated and the forces of nature cannot be completely controlled or even anticipated.

Nuclear power plants also produce huge amounts of radioactive waste, which threaten to poison all living beings for many thousands of years. Ten years after its removal from a reactor, the surface dose rate for a typical spent fuel assembly exceeds 10,000 rem/hour, but a fatal whole-body dose of radiation for humans is only about 500 rem (if received all at one time). There are already thousands of spent fuel assemblies, and no one really knows what to do with them because there is nowhere and no way to store them safely for such a long period of time. The United States has at least 108 sites that are contaminated and unusable, some of them involving many thousands of acres. The lifespan of some of these radioactive materials is very long: plutonium-239 has a half-life of about 24,000 years, meaning that half of it decays during that period but the other half remains as poisonous as ever. Human agriculture began only about 10,000 years ago; the likelihood that we will be able to secure such dangerous waste for much, much longer than that is not something to rely upon, to say the least.

In practice, the short-term "solution" has been to store the waste materials somewhere, put a fence around them, and forget about them. If the industry can get everyone else to forget about them too, the problem is solved -- for the time being, anyway. Let's leave it for our descendants to figure out what to do, and hope that will happen before the radioactive waste percolates into the water table.

Delusion takes many forms, but for Buddhism the fundamental delusion, at the root of our dukkha suffering, is ignorance of our true nature. The Buddhist teaching of anatta ("no-self") corresponds to the fact that our usual sense of self -- the sense that there is a "me" inside that is separate from the rest of the world outside -- is a psychological and social construct that normally feels uncomfortable because it can never secure itself. The Buddhist solution is to "forget oneself" and realize one's nonduality with the world: that I, like everyone else, am an impermanent manifestation of the whole, without any fixed reality that is separate from that whole.

Today, this delusion of separation is not only an individual problem but a collective one: the delusion that we humans are a unique species, obviously the most important of all, and therefore we can pursue our own benefit without any concern for the well-being of the rest of the biosphere. If we had a more nondual appreciation that we are an integral part of the planet -- that the Earth is not just our home but our mother, and that we never really cut the umbilical cord -- then it is inconceivable that we would choose nuclear (or fossil fuel) power over renewables, given all the long-term risks for such short-term gain.

The final irony is that the short-term gain for which we are willing to sacrifice so much (no, not our own sacrifice, of course -- we sacrifice the future!) may not be much of a gain at all. The purpose of any economic system is to help our societies flourish, yet it's becoming more doubtful consumerism is actually serving that function. Recent research by sociologists, psychologists and even economists suggests that, once a basic level of income has been achieved, what makes people happy is not more consumption but the quality of one's relationships with other people. Then why do we remain so committed to a dysfunctional economic process, which (among other problems) requires so much energy to keep producing so many unnecessary products?

If we can see through that collective delusion, the renewable alternatives to nuclear power become compelling. Rather than asking how we can generate the enormous amounts of energy that a consumerist economy needs, we need to restructure our societies according to the amount of renewable energy that's safely available.

David R. Loy is an advisor to the Ecobuddhism project.]]>Collective Bubbles of Delusiontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28104992013-03-07T11:12:26-05:002013-05-07T05:12:01-04:00David Loyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-loy/
Like other animals, we have instincts, but, thanks to our large neo-cortex, we can gain some degree of freedom from them by choosing how to respond to them. This is something that must be learned. We are born helpless and incomplete. During our extraordinarily long childhood, when the neo-cortex is developing, we are dependent upon, and vulnerable to, the conditioning controlled by caregivers.

So the downside of our relative freedom from instinct is our susceptibility to ways of thinking and acting inculcated by others. Much of that training process occurs before we have the conscious awareness to understand what is happening, much less any ability to evaluate it for ourselves. A common consequence is lifelong subordination to authority figures of one sort or another.

The sense of self develops in relation to other selves: we internalize our caregivers' and siblings' understanding of what the world is, and our role within it. And the conditioning does not end when we become adults. Since our egos are inherently insecure, in need of constant reinforcement, we remain very concerned about what other people think and especially sensitive to what they think about us.

Why do we usually believe something, such as a particular political ideology? Not because that belief-system is based on evidence. It's no coincidence that children normally have political opinions very similar to their parents'. We learn to believe something because it is believed by others whom we respect/identify with/want to be like/want to be liked by. We are good at finding reasons to justify what we believe, but it is much more difficult to examine critically and sincerely our deepest beliefs. In fact, we are not usually aware that they are beliefs: they are not just true, they are reality. We do not normally distinguish the stories we hold about the world from the world itself.

The Buddha was aware of this problem, and emphasized the importance of not being attached to views. He applied this to his own teachings, which he described as a raft that can help us to get across the river of samsara (this world of suffering, craving and delusion) to the "other shore" of enlightenment. He warns us not to think "this is a great raft, I'll carry it with me everywhere." Let it go!

In place of the Abrahamic duality between good and evil, Buddhism focuses on ignorance and wisdom -- the insight that comes with awakening. Delusion (moha) is one of the "three fires" or "three poisons" (the others are greed and ill will) that cause suffering when what we do is motivated by them.

Because it emphasizes individual awakening and personal transformation, Buddhism has not had much to say about collective delusion. It is of some importance that my delusions are usually not that different from the delusions of other people, especially those around me. I live within a bubble of beliefs that's not separate from theirs: in fact, our bubbles normally overlap so much that we can refer to group bubbles of delusion. These collective bubbles can help us understand why the world works the way it does, especially the institutional structures that perpetuate social dukkha (suffering).

"Climate change" is a good example. (I use quotation marks because it would be more accurate to refer to "climate breakdown" or even "climate collapse.") Many people in other developed nations are puzzled that so many Americans believe global warming is a "liberal hoax." Given the overwhelming scientific consensus about the seriousness of our situation, the denial movement is a classic case of a collective delusion bubble.

This example is important in another way too: it shows how much more dangerous the problem becomes when delusion is tied in with greed (the first of Buddhism's "three poisons"). As the old saying has it, it is very difficult to get people to see something when their livelihood depends on not seeing it. What is perhaps most baffling about climate change denial, though, is that there is little if any real benefit in doing so for anyone except those who own and manage fossil fuel corporations. Denying global warming is not only an especially problematic collective fantasy; it is a false belief manipulated with expensive and clever propaganda campaigns, by people who mostly know it is a dangerous fiction, but who are more interested in the short-term profits to be made by continuing to pump fossil carbon into the atmosphere. The result is not just a collective bubble of delusion: it is a bubble intentionally perpetuated by powerful corporations and billionaires -- an example of institutionalized delusion.

In collective denial -- such as that concerning climate change -- the group bubble of delusion becomes much more difficult to dispel, or even to become aware of, when people consciously or subconsciously believe they benefit by not seeing it. That suggests a Buddhist response: by truly letting-go of one's sense of self -- the ego-self whose well-being is separate from others' well-being -- the self-interest that sustains the bubble is undermined. This is true collectively as well as individually. In the case of climate change, we need to realize that the well-being of our own species can't be separated from the well-being of the whole biosphere. Buddhists and others need to realize that the kind of personal well-being, awakening and transformation we seek will not occur if we are indifferent to what is happening to other members of our community, our society and our natural world.